RIM's BlackBerry Messenger 6 Will Challenge Apple's iMessenger

RIM's BlackBerry Messenger 6 supports social apps, making the platform more of a challenger to Apple's upcoming iMessenger.

Research In Motion's BlackBerry Messenger will now support a variety of social applications, increasing the functionality of a core BlackBerry feature targeted by Apple's upcoming iOS 5.
BlackBerry Messenger 6, launched July 28, offers users the ability to chat within an application or game, as well as view lists of applications posted on BBM friends' profiles. It is available for download via BlackBerry App World.

"[BBM 6] represents an incredible opportunity for developers to leverage the viral nature of the BBM service," Alistair Mitchell, RIM's vice president of BBM Platform & Integrated Services, wrote in a July 28 statement, "and we have already begun working with various developer partners who will be bringing their BBM connected apps to BlackBerry App World."

RIM's BlackBerry Messenger update comes at a particularly auspicious time. Sometime this fall, Apple will release the next version of its mobile operating system, iOS 5, with a robust "iMessenger" conversation platform designed to take RIM head-on.
"Anyone with an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch can send unlimited free text messages to anyone else using an iOS device," Peter Misek, an analyst with research firm Jefferies & Co., wrote in a June 7 research note. "The two mainstays of RIM's sales have been corporate email users and consumer BBM users. While Apple lacks RIM's NOC/node infrastructure that allows for BBMing without a data plan with some carriers, [iMessenger] is otherwise a direct competitor."
Apple could increase its competitive profile with RIM, he added, if it launches a "low-cost iPhone in the fall targeted at prepaid and emerging markets."

RIM faces some serious challenges in the mobile space. At the end of May, for instance, research firm comScore estimated RIM's share of the U.S. smartphone market at 24.7 percent, lagging behind Apple at 26.6 percent and Android at 38.1 percent. The company has faced recent criticism about its increasingly antiquated line of BlackBerry devices, which it pledges will be replaced by late 2012 with a set of "superphones" based on the same QNX operating system currently present in the PlayBook tablet.
"RIM needs to focus on how to show why their enterprise-class capabilities are the way to go," Ray Wang, principal analyst of the Constellation Research Group, wrote in a July 28 email to eWEEK. The key to future success will be figuring out "how they can take a consumer innovation and make it enterprise class ... safe, secure, simple, sexy, sustainable, scalable."
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Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.